Wise-crack dictionary : More than 1,000 phrases and words in every day use…
Notre costume by Eugène Marsan is a compact reference dictionary of slang written in the early 20th century. The book gathers a lively cross-section of American colloquial speech and subcultural argot into brief, witty definitions, likely focusing on the humor, codes, and everyday phrases used by diverse groups. After a short foreword explaining the purpose and audience, the volume proceeds A to Z with more than a thousand entries, each offering a
punchy gloss on a wisecrack, idiom, or cant term. The entries span the talk of circus hands, stage folk, hobos, crooks, flappers, cowboys, gamblers, and city sophisticates, mixing Prohibition-era bar talk, vaudeville and showbiz codes, hobo rail lingo, underworld signals, and jazzy compliments. The tone is brisk and humorous, privileging memorable metaphors over dry definitions, and the arrangement is purely alphabetical, making it easy to dip in anywhere for a quick sense of how people actually spoke in the era. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Editor | Maines, George H. |
|---|---|
| Editor | Grant, Bruce |
| Title | Wise-crack dictionary : More than 1,000 phrases and words in every day use collected from 10,000 communications received during a newspaper prize contest and other sources, a new addition to the American dictionary |
| Original Publication | New York: The Spot News Service Publishing Company, 1926. |
| Credits | Carla Foust, Tim Miller and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PE: Language and Literatures: English |
| Subject | English language -- United States -- Slang |
| Subject | Americanisms -- Dictionaries |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77369 |
| Release Date | Nov 30, 2025 |
| Most Recently Updated | Dec 3, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 359 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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